Revision as of 14:40, 6 October 2017

The Maddison Project, also known as the Maddison Historical Statistics Project, is a project to collate historical economic statistics, such as GDP, GDP per capita, and labor productivity.[1][2][3] It was launched in March 2010 to continue the work of the late economic historian Angus Maddison. The project is under the Groningen Growth and Development Centre at the University of Groningen,[2] which also hosts the Penn World Table, another economic statistics project.[4]

This page describes the data and methods both produced by the explicit Maddison Project and produced by Angus Maddison before his death (since the Maddison Project is continuation of his work).

Contents

Summary

March 2010 for the explicit Maddison Project[1]1960s for the original work by Angus Maddison that was the genesis of the project.[5]:3

Data versioning

Only one update released as Maddison Project, published January 2013 with data till 2010.[5][6]Multiple versions by Angus Maddison, the last of which was published in February/March 2010.[7]

Focus

Historical: identify general ballparks and trends in living standards and economic growth over long time periods.Provide better insight into the timeline of the Great Divergence between Western Europe and other regions that were historically similarly situated, such as China and India.

Data description

Data dimensions and metrics

The data presented in the Maddison Project database is a partial function where:

The inputs (the dimensions) are country and year.

The metrics include:

Population: Included in

Real GDP

eal GDP per capita, expressed in 1990 international Geary–Khamis dollars. For simplicity, we will refer to this as GDP per capita.

Year dimension

While calendar years are the finest granularity at which data is presented, not all calendar years have data. Here is a description of how the granularity changes over time. Note that we count an year is present if there is data for at least one country for that year.[6]Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag